The brewing of beers including alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers has been a personal and home-based pastime for a very long time. To cater for first-time brewers, while at the same time providing for repeat brewers, there exist kits containing all the relevant ingredients and instructions to facilitate the making of beer. Kits of this type are sold from specialist and supermarket outlets. Home brew ingredient kits typically do not include the containers within which the brew is to be fermented, air locks, taps, bottles, caps, and other equipment as are required. The quantity of ingredients in the kits and the volume of the compatible arrangement is matched and supplied primarily to satisfy the home brew marketplace. Home-based brewers obtain the apparatus and starter kits which are sold separately from a variety of suppliers, fellow brewers and in some cases professional brewers. More serious home brewers acquire the highest quality of individual ingredients, as well as a variety of the many different home brew kits available from a variety of homebrew kit manufacturers, as well as alternative and supplementary ingredients with which to experiment and perfect home brew products to satisfy their particular taste. Indeed, some serious home brewers acquire and use industrial quality apparatus when available.
A typical first-time home brewer will tend to purchase a home brew apparatus kit (in addition to an ingredient kit) containing a 30 liter plastic fermenter, lid and rubber ‘O’ ring, a tap, washer and sediment reducer, an airlock and rubber grommet, a thermometer, a hydrometer and a bottling valve and tube. These items can be reused as long as appropriate sanitisation procedures are followed after each use and prior to each use.
All starter kits contain written instructions and some contain audiovisual recordings to assist the first-time user of those kits. Additional items such as bottles and caps will be required and are sometimes supplied in starter kits.
The largest item in those kits is the fermenter vessel and its associated lid typically accompanied by a seal of some description. The fermenter will also have an aperture at its base for the attachment of a tap so as to allow for the draining of liquid from the vessel and the lid will have an aperture suitable for fitment of an airlock which allows gases to be released from the volume of the fermenter vessel during the fermenting process.
The tap is typically a simple stop cock valve which is an OEM item typically made of food grade material, preassembled, and not designed for disassembly.
The airlock and its associated grommet is fitted to the lid of the fermenter vessel to allow gases created during the fermenting process to escape, while preventing atmospheric gases entering the interior of the fermenter vessel. The airlock in this arrangement works in conjunction with a seal between the lid and the body of the fermenter vessel to ensure that the only escape route for gases is via the airlock, and also to ensure atmospheric gases remain external of the fermenter vessel. The vessel and lid thus are preferably dimensionally compatible so that the seal performs its primary function. Indeed, home brewers do not always provide a good working seal which can allow gases to escape without flowing through the air lock. An undesirable consequence of that is that the brewer may believe that fermentation has ceased because of the lack of gas flow through the airlock, when in fact fermentation is still on going, but the gases are escaping via a poor seal. Incorrect determination of the end of fermentation is a common mistake for home brewers. Yet further, the seal becomes just another of the equipment elements that requires maintenance and appropriate sanitisation.
All the above-mentioned equipment, ingredients, and methods of brewing are available to the home-based brewer, yet these brewers still commonly produce poor quality and poor tasting batches of homebrew. This can be due to one or more of many reasons, a non-exhaustive list including: incorrect determination of the end of fermentation, incorrect or misinterpretation of temperature readings, lack of understanding of the fundamental fermentation process, poor timing of the one or more periods associated with the fermentation process which itself may be caused by the inability to be constantly or even periodically monitor the fermentation process, incorrect or lack of understanding of the importance of maintaining particular minimum and maximum temperatures, inability to consistently determine and apply all various parameters required to be monitored during the fermentation process, and the sheer complexity of the brewing process inhibiting some people who would otherwise desire or benefit from making their own non-alcoholic or alcoholic beverage in a home or nonprofessional environment.
The various problems associated with existing apparatus and their use are minimised or eliminated or at least an alternative is provided by the invention disclosed herein.